The Unwanted Mouth Guest

A Story Celebrating the Comedic Challenges Associated with Eating

If you’ve ever eaten food, you can likely agree that your teeth do a pretty great job of breaking it down into small enough pieces for digestive processing. What this tiny enamel army doesn’t excel at is self–cleaning (but maybe in 20 years maybe it will. That’s how evolution works, right?!). Of course, 99% of the time, food particles move through your mouth in an orderly fashion, with every piece accepting its fate of journeying into the waterpark commonly known as the digestive system. That said, occasionally a morsel will attempt to avoid its destiny, and desperately hide between two chompers, leading to some unwanted challenges for the human being those chompers belong to. With that, let’s proceed into “The Unwanted Mouth Guest”.

It was a delightful Summer day, and instead of running freely down a beach with butterflies and hummingbirds chasing after me, I was at an indoor event I would have rather not been at. I won’t bore you with the details, but let’s just say, if you were to draw a Venn Diagram of the event and me, the center area of overlap, or things common to us both, would be minuscule. Actually, the only relation would be that we both existed.

Of course, this ended up being one of those events where I seemed to be the only person in my circle of people who was actually able to make it. (Maxine, did you seriously have to spend all day putting pudding in seashell molds so that you could bring “shell puddings” to a work meeting the next day?!) That said, if I may say so myself, I made a valiant effort to introduce myself to people, but ended up calling it quits after executing a few accidentally awkward icebreakers. I had honestly intended to (generously!) provide free advice when I shared an idea of presenting my friends a pair of lovebirds at their wedding reception, and declaring “they live 1 million years, just like your love will!”, with a fellow attendee. This attendee didn’t seem too keen on my idea, and may have actually told security about me. Unfortunately for her (and security), I put on my sunglasses, made a quick hat out of various charcuterie board components (sliced meats and cheeses are extremely multi-purpose!) and became a new person.

Needless to say, I ended up flying solo for the majority of the event. I imagine I resembled the human form of a mighty bald eagle, a powerful, lone bird. I didn’t mind, I promise…! It’s not at all awkward being the sole individual who knows no one amongst a group of people who are finishing each other’s sentences and honestly, seemed to have been friends prior to being born. That said, the alone time did allow me to think about how much I could sell the centerpieces for if one happened to fall into my purse. I also may have accidentally googled, “black market for centerpieces”, so if you don’t hear from me for a while, you know my mistake caught up with me, and I’m in the hands of some folks responsible for national security.

I felt my accomplishment of being a confident, independent event-goer should be rewarded with some delicious, complimentary snacks. I continued minding my own business (having learned my lesson earlier), and made a plate full of goodies from the buffet. As I walked over to an empty chair, I excitedly took a bite out of an appetizing sushi roll, and a piece of nefarious seaweed lodged itself between my front two teeth.

“Of course, this would happen when I don’t have my usual zip lock bag full of individual floss picks with me nor a friend to guide me in fishing it out!” I lamented quietly.

As I sat there trying to pry the unwanted visitor from my mouth with my tongue (which wasn’t being very useful, so I silently threatened to nominate it for the next round of “vestigial organ awards”), I saw a prestigious looking middle-aged gentleman walking towards me.

“Who is that?” I asked myself, “and why is he approaching my table with such purpose?!”

He arrived at my table, and I looked around just to double-check that yes, I was the only person at the table.

“Gosh darn it!” I whispered. “WHY UNIVERSE, WHY NOW!!”

I tried to position my hands in a natural-looking way that shielded my mouth from view. The only thing I could think of, though, was to make a fist and put it in front of my mouth so that he couldn’t see the filthy piece of garbage that had taken up residence in my teeth.

“Paislee, I’m Dr. Roy! It’s been so long, you probably don’t even recognize me. How have you been?” he said cheerily. He obviously thought my unique fist placement was an indication I was going to clear my throat or was about to cough.

“Oh hi, Dr. Roy. Nice to see you. I’m…great! How have you been?” I replied, hoping that I had disguised the fact that no, I definitely didn’t remember him and that he wasn’t wondering why I hadn’t removed my first from in front of my face.

“Things are busy but good. I didn’t expect to see you here! What have you been up to, anything new on the go?”

My mind was going bananas; it was like a crazy light show gone wrong in there. I obviously had to move my fist away from my mouth, as I had stayed unnaturally long in the “I might sneeze/cough pose”, but there are only so many ways to disguise a leaf-like structure in your mouth.

To buy myself time while I thought of another hand gesture that would block his view, I emitted a drawn out “hmm”. I did that for a full 30 seconds, as my intent was to make him think I was pondering really hard about what was new in my life since I had last seen him (when had I last seen him, though!?).

Suddenly, the answer to my problem came to me as I saw an amazing sight out of the corner of my eye.

“Oh, you know me, nothing new of interest to report! Same old, same old.” I then swiftly moved from “the fist position” pose into a “point in the opposite direction of the face cavern” pose as I exclaimed, “Would you feast your eyes on that chocolate fountain that was just brought out; what an incredible work of art!” I did my best to make the fountain sound like the eighth Wonder of the World (not that chocolate fountains require any supplementary build-up outside of their natural characteristic of being a fountain of chocolate).

My strategic “point and distract” plan seemed to have worked perfectly as he turned his head to look at the chocolate fountain, far away from the plant growing in my mouth. “Wow, that is quite magnificent; I’ll have to check it out.”

I leveraged the moment by grabbing an opaque object, my can of Diet Coke, positioning it in front of my mouth so it appeared I was about to take a sip, and said, “I wouldn’t delay if I were you; as soon as word gets out, the heathens will devour it. It was nice to see you again, Dr. Roy!”

“Good idea. Great to see you, Paislee. Take care.”

I sincerely hope to apply the skills I learned that day in a future critically-acclaimed documentary on distraction techniques. I can picture my Oscar acceptance speech now for “Best Account Given in a Documentary that 1 Billion People Watched”, and it is truly something. It will certainly include expressing my thanks to chocolate, as it is a food that gives us more than we could ever ask for. Let us never take it for granted and worship it forever and always!